The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.
The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.
Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.
The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.
For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.
It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.
By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.
It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.
Do your research.
To the people in replies equating the hammer & sickle to the reclamation of 'queer':
No.
The word queer was created by queer people, and though it was appropriated as a slur for a while, it has been reclaimed as a self identifier for generations. The only people we hurt by calling ourselves by name is, perhaps, ourselves. Even if the term had originated as a slur, it would have been targetting queer people as victims, meaning we are the people to listen to about its reclamation.
US and W Euro communists did not create the hammer and sickle. It was not used to symbolize genocide against W Europeans and US Americans.
It is a military symbol of an empire that attempted, even occasionally succeeded at, genocide. The survivors of those attempts are the people harmed by its use.
We have no business 'reclaiming' the hammer and sickle; they aren't ours. The victims of USSR genocide alone determine who gets to reclaim it.
The rest of us would do well to defer to them, just like so many people deferred about the swastika after it was used as a symbol of genocide, too.
For a full century, use of the symbol was voluntarily deferred by Buddhists, Navajo, and other groups that used it. It is only being slowly re-adopted as the direct survivors of that genocide die of old age.
Meanwhile, the most recent USSR genocides were occurring during my own childhood and I'm a fucking millennial.
The only people who get to have an opinion about 'reclaiming' this symbol are the survivors of the genocides it represents.
We already have a simple, easy to use symbol for labour rights and equality that came out of our own history as W Euro and American communists. And it wasn't even used to justify mass murder!!
Shut the fuck up, put on your big kid panties, and use Bread and Roses. 🥖 🌹
Hi, Eastern European leftist here to cosign this.
The USSR was a brutal, genocidal, totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the Eastern Bloc was no better. In the last century, the second most common cause of death in my family (after Nazis) was "torture and murder by the communist government".
I have family members whose NAMES I don't even know, because the government thoroughly unpersoned them. (This is not a TikTok euphemism, btw. It's from Orwell's 1984.) Many of my family members were still terrified of speaking out against the government, even twenty years after the communist regime fell, even in private.
I don't even know what to talk about, really, to get people to see my point. The multiple genocides that the Soviet Union did, in an attempt to leave only the good Russians? The way that Jewish and Muslim communities were targeted far, far more than Christian ones? The mass surveillance and propaganda campaigns that left the populace a nervous and confused wreck? The KGB?
I mean, I get it. Y'all grew up in the West, all you've known your whole life is the crushing boot of Christianity and capitalism. You learned the word "propaganda" and you learned how the west lied and subverted and waged war and you decided that if the west was bad then the governments they opposed, such as the USSR, must be good, and that all the horror stories are propaganda.
They're not. The reality of Eastern European communism, as told to me by my family and by my country's historians, is WORSE than whatever you learned in history class.
And you, Western leftists, are not the inheritors of that trauma, and you don't get to claim it's symbols.
Stop using the hammer and sickle. Stop calling people "comrade". Stop talking about the glory of the Soviet Union. And for fuck's sake STOP PLASTERING IMAGES OF LENIN AND STALIN EVERYWHERE, my god, why the fuck is this even a thing I need to say.
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